From Plant Press, Vol. 21, No. 2, April 2018.
By Laurence J. Dorr
As much as I enjoy writing, I know I would never make it as a newspaper columnist. I have trouble meeting deadlines. I wait for inspiration or for a clever hook. Then the words flow relatively easily through a dozen or more drafts. If neither inspiration nor metaphorical fishing tackle save me, then I struggle. I have written a fair number of these columns, some confessional and others sermon-like. A few I knowingly structured as telegraphed messages: I laid out what I planned to do as chair to make a select few employees understand what I wanted to accomplish. I have discarded almost as many drafts of this column as I have completed. I have an extensive folder of scrunched up and discarded word processing documents, the electronic equivalent of paper balls tossed toward the trash can.
The activities of the department are something that I have not devoted much time to describing in these columns. For this, I am perhaps remiss. We have been busy the last few years and we have devoted enormous resources (planning, staff time, and money) to improving the U.S. National Herbarium. I hope the results are beginning to be visible. To begin with, there has been a physical overhaul of the herbarium. We converted our four compactor-bays from electrical to mechanical assist controls. We have gone from endless malfunctions to almost none, and some of us are getting more exercise in the bargain. We have added over 200 new herbarium cabinets, many of them replacements for older substandard wooden cabinets and yet others constructed to address the needs of special collections such as our bulky bamboos. These new cases permit some expansion but more importantly allow decompression of sections of the herbarium where specimens now are too tightly packed. Our goal is to remove and replace all of the substandard cabinetry in the herbarium. We also have mostly decluttered our common space although we still have far too much Botany material stored in the attic. (Yes, there is an attic in the Natural History building).
With generous financial support from the Smithsonian’s Digitization Program Office (DPO), Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO), and from the Sant Director of the National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) we have digitized more than 1.5 million herbarium specimens, including not only capturing images but also transcribing label data. We have accomplished this while continuing to operate the herbarium as normal. In other words, we have been able to do this without closing sections of the collection. It is difficult to convey to those who only visit us electronically the enormous behind-the-scenes preparation involved in our digitization project, but it exists and one of the less obvious benefits of digitization is that we are improving the physical curation of the entire collection.
We have always thought of our digitization project as more than physical curation or herbarium management and we are beginning to see the potential for applying machine learning to large digital datasets to answer more compelling evolutionary questions. To this end, we were pleased to receive support from both OCIO and the Institution’s Scholarly Studies program to recruit a two-year post-doctoral student who begins this September and who will tackle some very interesting questions about the distribution of morphological characters and plant family discrimination. It is also, as best we can tell, the first joint OCIO-NMNH postdoctoral fellowship.
With all our moving and shaking it only seemed logical to initiate a series of interrelated projects to update our filing systems to reflect current ideas about phylogenetic relationships. The Pteridophytes were reorganized when they were prepared for digitization, and are now organized according to the recently published Pteridophyte Phylogeny Group (PPG I, 2016) scheme. We have begun to reorganize the Angiosperms according to the most recent Angiosperm Phylogeny Group (APG IV, 2016) scheme. This is a little more challenging: the Angiosperm collection is much larger than the Pteridophyte one and it is on three separate floors of the herbarium rather than one. There will be a lot of shifting. A related and ongoing project to curate the grass herbarium, reorganizing its filing scheme and replacing and standardizing the folders, has helped make a huge dent in the reorganization of the Angiosperms. This past week we also received support to reorganize our Bryophyte collection, which we will store as loose packets of specimens in boxes in cases rather than as packets glued or pinned to sheets. This will facilitate and make more efficient the handling and curation of these materials.
We have consciously tried to become more responsive to external requests by implementing a new internal tracking system. Interestingly, not only can we now determine how long it takes to satisfy an external request, but we also are beginning to have data on the nature of our external requests. We still receive large numbers of loan and destructive sampling requests, but we have also noticed a significant number of digitization requests. These last will certainly disappear when we have the entire collection digitized, but we had not previously appreciated their volume.
What are some of the continuing challenges? We are still struggling to figure out the optimal system or systems for managing a fully digitized collection. Staff and visitors have been very cooperative. Unfortunately, for those of us who began in the non-digital era it is still difficult to accept we cannot rearrange a collection on the fly but need to submit specimens to others to update name changes or reimage. Another major challenge for us is figuring out how to increase our capacity to mount, or prepare, herbarium specimens. We have one fulltime employee, numerous volunteers, and various contractors. However, with several hundred thousand unmounted specimens in our backlog we need to become cleverer in how we increase our capacity.
I am very pleased with how committed our staff, volunteers, and contractors have been in helping us to accomplish so much in the past three years. My hope is that these physical improvements help lead to the formation of even more exciting intellectual ideas about plants and their evolution.
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